In Search of the Earth's Wild Places
In Search of the Earth's Wild Places
The Vuriloche Pass is sublime evidence of what we stand to lose.
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My Stendhal Syndrome moment came in northern Patagonia. It was not quite the physical reaction the French novelist Marie-Henri Beyle, aka Stendhal, experienced when he visited Florence’s Basilica of Santa Croce in 1817. The “sublime beauty” of the church and the tombs of Michelangelo, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Galileo Galilei made him go wobbly. But my Chilean moment of awe was as close as I have come to swooning.
Spread before me was the sprawling, turquoise lake Todos los Santos surrounded by wild rain-forested mountains. Further off was the perfectly conical snow-capped volcano Osorno and its smaller sisters. If Santa Croce is the “temple of the Italian glories,” this was the temple of natural glories. When he visited in 1913, former President Theodore Roosevelt said, “Surely there can be no more beautiful lake anywhere than this!” His visit encouraged the development of preserves in the region. The first one in Chile was Vicente Pérez Rosales National Park, located at Todos los Santos.
For me the sublime pleasure of this too-beautiful-to-be-true panorama came with a pang. “What will happen to this barely populated paradise?”
I decided I had to come back.
In a half century of travelling for work and pleasure—and now writing a book about it—I have searched for places that are not paved over, where man-made and nature-made glories have not been transformed into potted tourist attractions, replete with barely knowledgeable guides, souvenir shops on every corner, and too many people visiting for the wrong reasons. One will never have a Stendhal moment at the Louvre when their view of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is obstructed by people taking pictures of themselves taking pictures of the picture.
Tourism—as opposed to the Grand Tour reserved for the wealthy—is not much more than a century old. It began about the same time commercial air travel took off and workers came to think of paid vacations as a birthright. This coincided with the birth of the new concept of global interdependence. “The principal trait of the new era,” Paul Scott Mowrer, the first foreign correspondent to win a Pulitzer Prize, wrote in 1924, “is the henceforth unavoidable political, economic, and moral interdependence of the nations.”
Paradoxically, interdependence has made distant countries more accessible and simultaneously more like the places where we live. On a reporting trip to Jamaica some time ago, I was struck by its cultural leakage. As soon as a local entrepreneur invented a bamboo trinket for the tourist market, entrepreneurs on other islands copied it. The president of a Jamaican economic development agency lamented to me that South Koreans, Indians, and Japanese artists were recording reggae music.
This homogenization has made the world more fraught. The shrinking of the planet exacerbates political and cultural grievances. As the arson attacks on high-speed French railways during the summer Olympics showed, tourist infrastructure is ideal for terrorist statements. Security-conscious French authorities cordoned off the romantic walkway along the Seine River as though it were a military encampment. Some 45,000 police and gendarmes and 10,000 soldiers were on patrol. As I was writing this, terrorist threats forced Taylor Swift to cancel multiple shows in Vienna.
Todos los Santos reminds us of the genuine romance that remains possible, while hinting at a principal threat. Climate change, one of the most terrifying features of interdependence, is transforming travel as much as the coal-fired steam engine did in the 19th century.
My initial visit to Todos los Santos was a serendipitous stop on a meandering driving trip. Before leaving I arranged to return to the hamlet of Petrohué on the western tip of the lake. My goal was to venture into Rosales Park and traverse Vuriloche Pass, used for centuries by indigenous peoples. It joins modern Chile with Argentina on the other side of the Andes. My guide was Franz Schirmer, owner of the Petrohué Lodge, an ardent naturalist, and scion of the Swiss family that introduced tourism to the region more than a century ago. Schirmer is making Vuriloche Pass into a prime eco-tourism adventure destination. He hopes it will one day be reckoned as one of the ten best trekking sites in the world.
We began our journey with an hour-long boat trip across the lake and into the mouth of the Rio Blanco. As we motored around the rapids, ducks and geese jumped into the air. At a turn, half a dozen huasos, as Chilean gauchos are called, appeared along the shore. They were moving several large bulls. In their colorful cotton berets and short wool ponchos, with cigarettes drooping from their lips, they cut a jaunty ensemble.
At the point where the rapids became treacherous, we harbored the boat in a narrow slit in the shore. Waiting for us was one of Schirmer’s helpers, Jorge Sanchez, who had horses to carry provisions, and also to carry us when we were not trekking.
I had never encountered anything like the trails that lay before us. Over the centuries, human feet and animal hooves, coupled with erosion of the abraded soil, have worn the paths into trenches. Some are several inches deep; some rise above the heads of horseback riders. When covered with fallen logs and bushes, these trenches become dark tunnels. More than once, I neglected to bend low enough over the neck of my horse and banged my head or became tangled in the overhanging foliage.
The paving on these trails is nothing more than rows of logs over a few of the soggy patches. The signage is limited to three or four small boards with cryptic directions and several short strips of white plastic randomly tied to tree limbs. It is as bewildering as if New York City had only two street signs, one on East 42nd Street and another in Soho.
At one time a dozen Chileans lived in Vuriloche Pass. Now two do, both on old farms owned by Schrimer’s family. One of these men is Jorge. The other lives at La Junta, where we stopped the first night. La Junta lies at the junction of Rio Blanco and Rio Esperanza. Grey weather-beaten farm buildings and sheep were scattered on a large patch of green, gently undulating land. Schrimer recently built a tidy two-story hut here with his own hands. I was his second guest. On the other side of a swaying rope bridge, he had rigged a shower by piping steaming subterranean water over split bamboo pipes.
While we luxuriated in an adjacent hot tub that ancient peoples carved at the base of the rocky mountain, Schrimer recounted the early history of Vuriloche Pass. The word Vuriloche comes from the indigenous Mapuche tribe on the east side of the Andes, who used it to refer to those who lived here on the west side. It means “people from the other side of the mountain.” This vague word was fitting for the pass. The Chilean-side entrance was easy to miss because the Rio Blanco takes a buttonhook turn that was difficult to discern in the thick pristine forest.
The nomadic Poya—those “people from the other side of the mountain”—kept the existence of the trans-Andean thoroughfare hidden from the Spanish until a crisis arose. As the story goes, Nicolás Mascardi, an Italian Jesuit priest, was shown the pass in exchange for the release of a Poya princess imprisoned in Chiloé Island on the Pacific Coast. Mascardi believed the pass would lead to more souls he could save and to the mysterious City of the Caesars, a supposed El Dorado of earthly riches. He is credited with many conversions, but not enough answered his call. When Mascardi was on his third quest for the golden city in 1672, the Mapuches killed him near the present-day Argentinian town of Bariloche, a bastardization of the word Vuriloche.
The forests leading up to the Argentine border are a story unto themselves. Seamless stands of old growth alerce trees lie on one side of the Rio Blanco. These are native to Patagonia and among the largest on the planet. The trunks can be so thick that four people cannot collectively put their arms around them. The new coihue growth trees date from the early twentieth century when settlers cleared forest land that they later abandoned. Also native to Patagonia, these evergreen trees are tall, thin, and branchless almost up to the top, appearing like hundreds of towering, upright pencils. I felt that I was in a surrealistic Salvador Dalí painting.
The dominant feature is the glaciated volcano Tronador (Thunderer). At 3,491 meters, it is the highest in Rosales Park. Tens of thousands of years ago Tronador’s glaciers extended as far as Puerto Varas, more than sixty miles away. The mountain and the clouds that danced round it came in and out of view as we ascended upward through the forest to a plateau. On the other side of the wide valley Tronador’s apron formed a semicircle. On top was a glacier, pieces of which fell to the ground eons ago and were, in turn, covered with falling rocks. As if by magic, melting glacier water flowed out of the base of the rock-roofed ice formation.
Here was the headwater of the Rio Blanco. And here was the secret to the color of the water in Todos los Santos. The grinding of the glacier against underlying rock creates sediment that is carried downstream with the water. This glacier milk produces a turquoise color when it touches the bright blue lake water.
As we took in this scene, avian entertainment appeared, first of all in the form of two condors, whose wingspans typically measure ten feet. The pair swooped and soared. Then in a nearby hut, Schrimer liberated a hummingbird trapped in a dilapidated window. With its kaleidoscope feathers and docility, the tiny bird was the opposite of the black condors, which seemed to regard us as a possible dinner.
The dirt-floor hut was aptly marked on the map as “Refugio Primitivo.” Built by Sebastian de la Cruz, one of Argentina’s great mountain climbers, it is one of those buildings that looks old the day the last nail was driven into the rough wood. But it kept us out of the rain and cold. During the night I could hear the occasional roar of small avalanches on the glacier.
The rain had been a manageable irritant. Jorge Sanchez deftly guided us up slick paths and across the swollen rivers. But another form of weather—snowstorms—was not conquerable. Though it was summer, so much snow had fallen that we could not make our way to the border, which was in tantalizing view.
Climate aberrations are becoming climate continuities. Once-in-a-generation hurricanes are annual events. So are fires in forests desiccated by drought. Since I was in Vuriloche Pass last December, Chile’s Atacama Desert, the driest on the planet, was blanketed by white and purple blooms due to unseasonal rain. The bloom is rare under any circumstances but especially since it was winter.
July 22, 2024 was the hottest day ever recorded on earth. In my travels since Chile, I have witnessed the consequences of such global warming. On a fishing trip to Alaska, my son and I caught plenty of rainbow trout but only one king salmon. A state conservationist, who was making a census of the fish, was despondent over the sharp decline in the population swimming upriver to spawn. Among the causes, she said, were warming seawater and overfishing. Again, I felt that pang. “Will there be any king salmon for my grandsons to catch?”
With my partner, Bettsie, I went to Southern Italy to visit a hilltop town that is not a prime destination on tourist itineraries. Pietrabbondante is in the Molise region, southeast of Rome. On its outskirts lies Santuario Italico, beautifully restored pre-Roman stone ruins dating from 400 BC. Hannibal sacked the city around 200 BC. Only one small busload of peaceful tourists was there when we were. Pietrabbondante’s narrow streets are serene. Terra Mia, a new restaurant started by a local young couple, serves farm-raised food.
The problem was heat. A tidy bed and breakfast, Borgo San Pietro, offered a view of one of the lovely valleys that fan out beneath the town. But haze from the elevated summer heat blurred the beauty. Italian advisories cautioned that even healthy people were at risk from the soaring temperatures. One report warned the heat could warp rail tracks and force passenger trains to run at reduced speeds.
Over the years I have found corners of the world that remain authentic despite being common tourist stops. A reasonably fit person can climb the paths leading to the summit of Mount Olympus in Greece. The trail is not overcrowded. The sound of sheep bells ring out as sweetly from distant mountains as they did in Homer’s time.
But it is difficult to avoid the trite and oversubscribed. On our summer Italian trip we made the mistake of visiting the Blue Grotto on the island of Capri. Small rowboats take visitors through the narrow, low entrance into the cavern. The iridescent blue water inside is not that different from the shallow water along much of the shore and not nearly as spectacular as the turquoise water at Todos los Santos. Whatever pleasure might derive from this is lessened by the large number of bobbing boats in the small space and the pilots cacophonously belting out “O Solo Mio,” “Arrivederci Roma,” and other cliché songs.
When the writer Henry James visited the grotto in the early 1900s, he did not go in with the “brotherhood of American and German tourists.” Standing on an observation deck, he mused, “How delightful it might be if none of them should come out again.” His “psychological moment,” as he called it, was the opposite of Stendhal’s.
80 percent of travelers visit 10 percent of the world’s tourism destinations, according to Murmuration, which monitors the environmental impact of tourism. Capri swarms with tourists dodging each other and peering into shops that can be found on New York’s Fifth Avenue. Worthwhile sites, such as Florence’s Basilica of Santa Croce, require sweaty visitors to wait in long lines.
This year Venice imposed a tourist fee on high-volume days. The idea was to reduce wear and tear on the sinking World Heritage Site and give the residents some relative peace and quiet. The experiment failed. Tourists were happy to pay the extra five euros.
Residents of Barcelona have assaulted tourists eating al fresco with squirt guns. That act of benign terrorism is not likely to work either. But another approach might. The Barcelona city government recently announced that it would stop issuing licenses for short-term Airbnb-type rentals. The move was driven by concern that locals were being priced out of the rental market.
Tourism can trample itself to death without regulation by city and state authorities and lifestyle adjustments by tourists. Even those who don’t believe in global warming are moving travel dates to early and late summer. The time may not be far off when children go to school in the summer so the family can travel together in the fall.
We need to learn to travel. This begins with a sense of adventure, imbibing the smells and sounds, trying new dishes even if we end up hating some. It requires consideration for the people on whom we intrude. You can use AI to plan your trip. But you do not get much out of travel if you don’t work at it when you are on the ground.
The challenge for Schirmer is to balance hut-building with environmental preservation. He does not want rows of chalets, concession stands, or fine dining. He wants jobs for people like Jorge Sanchez and a wider appreciation of the beauty that the Viruloche Pass affords.
A broad rainbow spanned the pass when we began to retrace our steps from the glacier. In La Junta that night, it snowed again. We awoke to the snow-dusted mountains looking like a sepia photograph. Beautiful but freakish.
Whether Schirmer can make his plans for Viruloche Pass pay remains to be seen. But I agreed with him as we left: “Hopefully,” Schrimer said, “this never ends.”
John Maxwell Hamilton is a journalism professor at Louisiana State University and author of numerous books, including Manipulating the Masses: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda.
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